Nikos Kazantzakis

Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion on 18 February 1883, when Crete was still under Ottoman rule, and the Cretan uprisings of his childhood, in which his father took part, gave him his lifelong themes of struggle and freedom. He studied law in Athens (1902–06) and philosophy in Paris (1907–09), where he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, and he returned a writer with a huge appetite: Nietzsche, Buddhism, Lenin and Christ would all pass through his work. In 1911 he married Galatea Alexiou; the marriage ended, and in 1945 he married Eleni Samiou, his companion since the 1920s.

In 1917 he tried to run a lignite mine in the Mani with a workman called Giorgis Zorbas, an adventure that failed commercially and gave him his most famous character. Then came decades of travel as a journalist and restless pilgrim, to Russia, Japan, China, Spain, Egypt, Sinai and England, which produced his travel books Ταξιδεύοντας (Travelling). From 1933 he lived mainly on the island of Aegina, where he wrote the Odyssey, and after the war he served briefly as a minister in the Greek government (1945) and worked for UNESCO in Paris.

In 1948 he settled in Antibes on the French Riviera, and there, in his sixties, he wrote the novels that made him famous in one extraordinary burst. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, including in 1957, the year it went to Albert Camus. He fell ill on a journey to China and died in Freiburg, Germany, on 26 October 1957. The Church of Greece had attacked him over The Last Temptation, and he was buried not in a cemetery but on the Martinengo bastion of the Venetian walls of Heraklion, overlooking the city.

For most of his life Kazantzakis thought of himself as a poet and philosopher. His short credo Ασκητική (The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, 1927) and his Οδύσσεια (The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, 1938), a sequel to Homer in 33,333 seventeen-syllable verses in which Odysseus leaves Ithaca again and ends his life in the Antarctic, were his life's work as he saw it. Few people read them today.

The novels written after 1941 are another matter. Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά (Zorba the Greek, 1946) sets a bookish narrator beside Zorba, an ageing Macedonian labourer who eats, dances, loves and grieves with his whole body, on a Cretan beach where they try to run a mine; it is a novel about how to live. Ο Καπετάν Μιχάλης (Freedom and Death, 1953) is about the Cretan revolt of 1889 and a fierce chieftain modelled on his father. Ο Χριστός ξανασταυρώνεται (Christ Recrucified, 1954) follows a Greek village in Asia Minor that stages a Passion play and finds the villagers chosen to play Christ and the apostles living out their roles when refugees arrive. Ο τελευταίος πειρασμός (The Last Temptation, 1955) imagines Jesus as a man tempted to the end by an ordinary life; it earned him the hostility of the Orthodox Church and, decades later, Martin Scorsese's film. Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο (Report to Greco, 1961), published after his death, is his autobiography, addressed to the painter El Greco, a fellow Cretan. Kazantzakis wrote a rich, idiosyncratic demotic full of Cretan dialect words he collected on his travels, which makes him harder to read than his plain subjects suggest, but also unmistakable.

Start with the film: Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba the Greek (1964) made the sirtaki and Theodorakis's theme the sound of Greece abroad, and the dance on the beach is quoted everywhere, though the book is darker and better. Heraklion's airport is named Nikos Kazantzakis, his grave on the Martinengo bastion is a place of pilgrimage with its three-line epitaph, and the village of Myrtia, his father's home, has a Kazantzakis Museum with his manuscripts and his desk. Extracts from his novels and from Report to Greco appear in school anthologies. His epitaph, «Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος», is probably the most quoted sentence of modern Greek prose. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, more than those of any other Greek novelist.

• His Odyssey has exactly 33,333 verses and took him thirteen years and seven drafts to finish.
• The real Zorba, Giorgis Zorbas, was a miner from Macedonia whom Kazantzakis hired in 1917 to run a lignite mine in the Mani; the mine failed.
• Heraklion's international airport bears his name.
• His grave is on the Venetian city walls of Heraklion, outside any cemetery, because of his quarrel with the Church.